Review of "Becoming a Certified Six Sigma Master Black Belt" by Husain Al-Omani, Hemant Urdhwareshe, Thomas J. West

Score: 91+/100 (9.1+ out of 10)

Becoming a Certified Six Sigma Master Black Belt is an ambitious, information-rich, and potentially valuable professional resource written by three highly accomplished experts. It covers an astonishing range of strategic, financial, organizational, instructional, and statistical material. As a desk reference or certification-preparation tool, it has considerable value. As a continuous reading experience, however, it is dense, uneven, impersonal, and insufficiently polished. The book teaches quality more successfully than it consistently demonstrates it.

This book really isn't written as a captivating or entertaining business book. It is written as an enormous certification manual, reference guide, technical workbook, and compressed textbook all at once. We read ISO 45001: 2018 EXCELLENCE by Dr. Mohamed -Ali Ibrahim, and these two books have the same vibe. They are also on the same price tier.

This book's primary goal is to cover the complete body of knowledge needed by an aspiring Six Sigma Master Black Belt, not to build a relationship with the reader or make the material memorable through storytelling or case studies.

That distinction matters. Some of the technical density is unavoidable because this is an advanced certification guide. However, the problem is not merely that the subject is technical. The problem is how the technical information is presented.

The book frequently defines, lists, categorizes, calculates, and instructs. It rarely illustrates what this work feels like in the real world. Even when discussing people, leadership, coaching, resistance, motivation, and organizational culture, it tends to reduce human behavior to another system that must be measured, organized, monitored, and controlled. The result is informative but emotionally flat.

The book explains the knowledge and responsibilities expected of a Six Sigma Master Black Belt, the highest level in the Six Sigma “belt” system. So, we had to educate ourselves about this. At first we thought this belt system was a bit gimmicky. Then again, a lot of things in business are gimmicky. Haven't you watched pro wrestling? Or seen a featured deal or special at McDonald's?

Anyway, this book's central message seems to be that a Master Black Belt is not merely an expert in statistics. The Master Black Belt is supposed to become an organization-wide improvement leader who:

- Connects improvement projects to the company’s strategy
- Selects and prioritizes projects
- Manages a portfolio of improvement initiatives
- Coaches executives, managers, Black Belts, and Green Belts
- Designs and evaluates training
- Helps organizations manage change
- Measures financial and operational performance
- Applies advanced statistical tools
- Builds a lasting culture of continuous improvement

That is probably the book’s strongest overarching idea. It presents the Master Black Belt as a combination of statistician, strategist, teacher, project manager, consultant, coach, and organizational architect.

The book begins with enterprise-wide planning and explains how organizations can turn broad missions and long-term goals into specific, measurable improvement projects. It introduces familiar strategic tools such as SWOT and PESTEL analysis before discussing Hoshin Kanri, a Japanese system that spreads strategic goals throughout every level of a company. The “catchball” process allows goals, concerns, and feedback to move between executives, managers, supervisors, and frontline employees. One case study follows a struggling steel-related company that learns to treat red performance indicators as signs of where improvement is needed rather than automatic failures. After seven months and about 21 meetings, the company reportedly meets its goals and sells for 175 percent of the expected price. From there, the book moves through governance, organizational maturity, staffing, DMAIC, Lean, Design for Six Sigma, project selection, risk management, and the process of identifying, prioritizing, funding, executing, and measuring improvement projects.

The next section focuses on organizational culture and leadership, arguing that Six Sigma cannot succeed through statistics alone. The authors discuss systems thinking, executive support, leadership styles, employee motivation, communication, workplace conflict, resistance to change, customer feedback, and performance measurement. They also summarize several well-known change-management frameworks, including ADKAR, Kotter’s eight-step model, Lewin’s unfreeze-change-refreeze model, the change curve, the McKinsey 7-S framework, and the Competing Values Framework. The central idea is that leaders must communicate priorities, remove barriers, assign resources, involve employees, and reinforce the desired culture. The section also introduces financial tools such as return on investment, cost of quality, break-even analysis, activity-based costing, balanced scorecards, cash flow, and key performance indicators.

The project and portfolio management section explains how improvement projects should be selected, planned, staffed, budgeted, monitored, and completed. It covers project charters, work breakdown structures, schedules, communication and risk plans, Gantt charts, PERT, critical paths, resource forecasting, earned-value management, cost and schedule variances, performance indexes, and corrective actions. The authors repeatedly warn organizations against approving projects simply because someone has an interesting idea. Instead, projects should be evaluated according to their connection to strategic goals, expected financial or operational benefits, risks, costs, resource requirements, feasibility, and likely effect on customers. The material is practical, although much of it reads like a condensed project-management certification guide.

The chapters on training, coaching, and mentoring explain how Master Black Belts should identify skill gaps, create training plans, accommodate adult learners, develop instructional materials, measure training effectiveness, and continue supporting employees after formal classes end. The authors also address executive coaching, project reviews, meeting facilitation, mentoring Green and Black Belts, and engaging frontline workers. Some of the book’s most thoughtful ideas appear here, including the importance of psychological safety, respect for employees’ existing experience, constructive feedback, different learning styles, and helping workers understand how their daily responsibilities support the organization’s larger purpose. Unfortunately, these potentially human subjects are still presented mainly through lists of tactics, guidelines, activities, and expected outcomes, so the writing rarely creates the personal connection it encourages leaders to develop.

The final major instructional section becomes far more technical, devoting roughly half of the book to advanced statistics and data analysis. It covers measurement error, signal-to-noise ratios, Monte Carlo simulation, measurement-system analysis, kappa statistics, gauge repeatability and reproducibility, nonnormal data, statistical process control, forecasting, regression, ANOVA, linear programming, reliability modeling, design of experiments, Taguchi methods, predictive analytics, TRIZ, and numerous other specialized subjects.

The authors frequently use Minitab commands, formulas, screenshots, tables, calculations, exercises, and downloadable data files. This may be valuable for experienced professionals preparing for certification, but the pace is relentless and gives readers very little time to absorb one concept before another appears. The closing section adds four essay-style certification scenarios and a 100-question simulated examination. These materials strengthen the book as a study guide, but they also reinforce the impression that it is more effective as a technical reference and exam-preparation resource than as an engaging book to read from beginning to end.

Look, there’s a lot of valuable information in this book for you to learn and discover, provided you’re willing to endure the text. And that’s a tall order, not because the text is long, but because it’s so dense, mundane, and technical. Do you enjoy looking at graphs, charts, and diagrams? Does it invigorate you, exhilarate you, and make you feel like pumping your fist in the air? This might be for you.

The average or even above-average reader is likely to find this overwhelming and exhausting. Far from enjoyable.

You know what this book reminded us of? It reminded us of Real-Time Earthquake Tracking and Localisation by George R. Daglish and Iurii P. Sizov. That's right, this business book reminded us of a book about tracking earthquakes. How? Well, both books take fascinating concepts and good intentions, then bury them beneath a landslide of numbers, formulas, and codes which are incomprehensible to about 99.9% of the human population. There are probably more germs that survive a Lysol wipe over a dinner table than people on Earth who understand what these numbers, formulas, and codes even mean, much less how to apply them to their lives and businesses.

If you've ever woken up one day and decided you wanted to learn about the "Percent Error, Signal-to-Noise Ratio," the Johnson transformation, nested ANOVA, Monte Carlo tolerance design, or the Graeco-Latin square design, congratulations: you might actually enjoy this book.

Think about the most memorable business books ever published: Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki or The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt...

Or think about some of the best business books that have won awards at the Outstanding Creator Awards over the years:

The Golden Blueprint by Mark Parrish (who owns like 19 McDonald's franchises)

From Purpose to Profit by Erin Andrea Craske

The Value Equation by Christopher H. Volk

The Way of the Wall Street Warrior by Dave Liu

Business Leadership in Turbulent Times by Michael Lawrie and George Tsetsekos

You Have to Live, Why Not Win? by Dave Ketchen, Larry D. Thornton

Never Sit in the Lobby by Glenn Poulos

The Passionate Workforce by Nicholas Capman

...They all told stories or used case examples that were personable, relatable, practical, and applicable to the everyday businessman. Those were books in which the author(s) sounded human and like they were talking to YOU—an actual breathing, bleeding person. An actual breathing, bleeding fellow human.

We thought this book sounded more like a robotic calculator talking to a computer, or vice-versa. Do you really want your business book to read like a calculus textbook?

That said, let us digress for a moment because there is another side to this book.

For all our complaints about the reading experience, the physical and structural presentation is excellent. The formatting is clean, professional, and remarkably consistent throughout. Headings, subheadings, tables, diagrams, formulas, examples, exercises, and answer sections are easy to identify. The book is divided into logical sections, and readers can quickly locate material on strategic planning, project management, coaching, financial analysis, measurement systems, regression, reliability, or experimental design. It looks and feels like a serious professional reference book.

The organization may actually be one of its greatest strengths. This is not a random pile of information. The book moves from enterprise-wide planning and organizational culture into project management, training, coaching, advanced analytics, case studies, and examination preparation. Even when the content becomes exhausting, readers can usually understand where they are, what subject is being discussed, and how the chapter connects to the responsibilities of a Master Black Belt.

There is also a tremendous amount of hidden value here for readers who are willing to dive into it slowly. This may not be a book you read once and place on a shelf. It may be a book you return to repeatedly over several years. A professional could use one chapter while developing a training program, another while evaluating a project portfolio, and another while investigating process variation or preparing for an examination. The enormous range that makes the book difficult to read from beginning to end may make it extremely useful as a long-term reference.

The practice questions, essay scenarios, examples, formulas, diagrams, software demonstrations, and 100-question simulated examination give serious certification candidates plenty to work with. Readers who already understand the basics may appreciate having so many advanced subjects gathered into one volume rather than searching through several separate textbooks. There is value in that convenience, especially for professionals who know exactly what they need and are willing to study rather than merely read.

We also appreciate the authors’ larger vision of what a Master Black Belt should be. The ideal Master Black Belt is a strategist, teacher, coach, analyst, project leader, and organizational problem-solver. The book repeatedly connects improvement to leadership, customer needs, employee development, financial performance, and long-term cultural change. That breadth gives the profession more meaning than the dramatic “belt” title initially suggests.

Clearly, a lot of time, effort, research, pain, and experience went into the production of this book, which is admirable.

So, yes, this book can feel like a robotic calculator talking to a computer. It can be dense, dry, impersonal, and difficult to absorb. But buried beneath all those charts, formulas, acronyms, and statistical models is an extraordinary collection of professional knowledge. Readers who are serious about Six Sigma certification or continuous improvement may discover far more value here than casual readers ever will.

This is not an easy book. It is not an entertaining book. It is not a book most people will devour in a weekend.

But it is ambitious, organized, professionally presented, and potentially indispensable to the exact audience it was created to serve.

Check it out on Amazon!